Letter to Bulletin

Sep 5, 2005

Dear Sirs,

What a "gushing" Editorial you wrote Thursday Sept 1st in support of the Terminal. (I guess you will not see fit to publish this letter). So a couple of sea Captains come down from afar and go for a boat ride out to the Seaway and from that comes their 'conclusion' that a Terminal on the Spit will be fine, and not just for normal cruise ships, oh no, now for the largest Cruise ship class currently afloat, and without Tug assist on most days!! give us a break please, I can just picture one of these 300m long monsters getting it wrong - unusual wind, tide and wave conditions, which can happen anytime, and it only needs to happen once, and we have a blocked Seaway and an environmental disaster of unseen proportions. Then there are the maintenance dredging costs which will be enormous, once again, just one abnormal event of nature can undo 6 months of expensive dredging overnite (sic), and who pays for the maintenance dredging? you can bet it won't be those who reap the 235 million bucks of "benefit over the next 2 decades" which you mentioned, that?s 12 million bucks of benefit a year, big deal, the maintenance dredging cost alone would top 5 million bucks a year, without any freak nature event. Notwithstanding any of these real risks and the pretty vague nay lack of "real benefit to the broader GC community", the Spit and the Broadwater should be left alone, the Spit being the last remaining piece of nature available to the ordinary public, and to the many visitors to the poor overdeveloped Gold Coast, and with the boating traffic now reaching critical safety proportions on the Broadwater, and the ever shrinking foreshore access, as well as the clogged roads, guess what, we poor regular folks will have nowhere "free" to go to relax, and visitors won't want to visit the Gold Coast, they will look for a destination that offers more quality time and space to relax in and involving less hassle than coming to the overcrowded and over rated mess that the GC is rapidly becoming. That the GCB reaps enormous profit from Developer advertising is a given, but don't let that cloud your judgement on what is best for the greater community and our visitors in the long term,